(You Should) Play Story War by Cantrip Games

Story War (just one war) is a fast-paced, social, storytelling card game made by Cantrip Games. It premiered on Kickstarter, where it achieved monumental success. The way the game works is the players are split up into teams and one person acts as a judge for a round. The players have Warrior Cards (like a zombie who just wants a little piece of mind, a cerebus with two doberman heads and one corgi head, or a leprechaun who is so lucky that every time he flips a coin it lands as two coins). Each round is an open discussion between the teams that tells the story of a fight between the teams, with the judge acting as mediator.

My best friend in the world moved back to the Twin Cities after graduating college and he and a couple others came over to hang out and play. I got so excited doing the Print-&-Play that I made up a little card-stock box using the teaser box art.

This is what dedication looks like, folks.

The game was SO MUCH FUN!

Our first round saw a Goblin, an Imp, and a Kracken duke it out in a Pirate Cove. The Goblin used his engineered drone copters to drag the Kracken out of the water but the Imp had secretly stuffed all of the pirate ships with explosives and blew everybody up.

The second round had a Zombie, a Witch, and King Midas fight at a High School where the Zombie turned the football team into his zombie army. Then King Midas turned them all into gold and assimilated them into his golden cybernetic systems and starting stomping the zombie with his newly acquired colossal size. The Witch ended the match quickly by using her magic to superheat King Midas and cover the Zombie in molten gold.

The last round we played had a Nymph, a Gremlin, and a Leviathan battle in the middle of a Maelstrom. The Gremlin fused with the lightning in the storms and evaded almost everybody’s attacks. The Nymph communed with Gaea and made a natural zone of protection. The Leviathan was so big, however, that it just unhinged its jaw and swallowed the nature bubble whole. Then it called upon the magic of the sea to lob Excalibur from the waves to spear the Gremlin in the chest. What the Leviathan didn’t know was that the Nymph had turned the nature zone into a spiky rock ball as a final middle finger and, despite being dead, gained the moral victory by ensuring the Leviathan’s slow and painful demise.

The game was super engaging and the rounds generally moved quickly. The only kind of wobble with the gameplay was that nobody wanted to start final arguments and end the round. The “final argument” phase seemed always to favor the last person to give an argument because they could one-up everybody else and the players who already had given their arguments couldn’t give a rebuttal. We fixed this by adding a house rule that everyone wrote their final arguments down at the same time and then read them off as if they happened simultaneously. That way nobody could override anyone else unfairly.

Right now the game is in post-production, although there is a print and play option through the Kickstarter and the pre-order. It is expected that the commercial release of the game will ship some time in early fall.

These are just the print-and-play versions. The release versions will be much bigger and also shinier.

Story War is an incredibly fun, social game and you should check it out at Cantrip Games’ site. I took it to MicroConsom, the Kicked In The DiceBags/Fear The Boot mini-con on the 22nd of June where we had a game of seven people which was amazing. It’s definitely one of those games where the more people you have, the better.